The outdoor fanatic who will be ‘a surfer till I die’ is the latest OCI official caught in Rio ticket probe
AS A fanatic surfer, Martin Burke must have relished the prospect of the Rio Olympics. Instead he will now recall the Games for the wrong reasons.
Brazilian police investigating alleged ticket irregularities linked to Pro10, the Olympic Council of Ireland’s ticket reseller, want to speak to Mr Burke, the OCI Sports Director.
They believe he knew of the OCI’s ticketing arrangements, a statement apparently based on an Excel spreadsheet found on a hard drive said to belong to him.
That Mr Burke may have had an Excel spreadsheet of interest to investigators is credible. They were part of his job. He once posted a seven-minute YouTube video demonstrating a complex spreadsheet designed to oversee accreditation and access for athletes to an Olympic village.
The video appears to be part of a course requirement for an Executive Masters in Sport Organisations Management completed in 2014 at Université Catholique de Louvain.
The degree, endorsed by the International Olympic Committee, was presented to Mr Burke by IOC president Thomas Bach, another figure police in Rio want to speak to.
With the OCI since 1992, Mr Burke will be well known to most of Ireland’s world-class athletes. He tweeted many of them, Sonia O’Sullivan included, to ask that they ‘like’ an internet project that formed part of his Executive Masters coursework.
Mr Burke’s private life appears to revolve around sport. The ex-Olympian is an avid canoeist, cyclist and surfer, who tweeted he will be a ‘surfer till I die’.
A long-time member of the Salmon Leap canoe club, Mr Burke lives in Celbridge, Co. Kildare, with his partner Orlagh Keating, also a dedicated surfer. They also have a holiday home close to Easkey in Sligo, close to his birthplace.
Mark Conway, a former director of Dublin Women’s Mini Marathon, told reporters in recent weeks that he had emailed Mr Burke in February to complain about Pro10’s procedures for supplying tickets.
‘I am unsure how Pro10 was selected as a seller. Anyone who I know that has completed an application for tickets over the past number of weeks have yet to hear anything back from them,’ he wrote.
In response he was told: ‘Thank you for your email which we have forwarded on to the Authorised Ticket Reseller, Pro10, as the Olympic Council of Ireland has no function in the selling or organisation of the tickets.’
‘OCI has no function in organising tickets’